About

Welcome to My Psych Resources!

As a retired college educator, it is my dream to bring academic research to the general public and to present research findings in an interesting and comprehensible format. The genesis of this site was born years ago when I worked with college students who struggled with accessing, reading, and understanding academic research. 

My area of expertise is in psychology and family studies, and I focus on summarizing recently published meta-analytic studies and reviews of literature on these subjects.

I hold a Ph.D in family studies with a minor in psychology, an M.Ed in marriage and family counseling, and a B.S. in psychology. Like many undergraduate students, I struggled with finding the right major–there were just so many things I was interested in. I finally chose psychology because I wanted to understand human motivation. In my free time, I love to travel and have visited most of the 50 United States, Japan, and Western Europe.

Why You Should Read Scholarly Research

Do you struggle with accessing research published in scholarly journals? Before Google Scholar, the only way to access most academic research was via a university library. Google Scholar has become a game changer as many research articles are freely available to everyone. Public libraries are another means of accessing published research. Public libraries often subscribe to academic journals and give access to their patrons with library cards.

Do you find it challenging to read research studies? There are informative guides available online to help you dissect and then read journal articles. If you have taken a research methods course in college, this knowledge will help you interpret the study design used in an article. I recommend that you first read the abstract (usually printed at the top of the article and accessible to everyone) before proceeding. If this looks like a study that you are interested in learning more about, read the introduction and/or literature review for the article. This provides an excellent background about the topic as well as any previously published research that informed the design of the present study. In the “method” section, the authors give specifics about who participated in their study and how each variable was measured. Finally, you may want to skip the “results” or “findings” section (especially if you find the statistical data confusing) and go to the “discussion” section. This section is where the authors “make sense” of their results and explain it in terms of other published research and theories on the topic.

Here are some great resources with advice for reading a journal article:

https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/reading-scholarly-articles

https://libguides.brown.edu/evaluate/Read